It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.

------------ Kenneth Grahame

Friday, March 11, 2011

Aren't All Poems Love Poems?

But there comes a lift, a bluff of wind from the west,an intimation. I have nothing to offer but this: a lull --a softening -- that, and the discipline not to speakwhen opportunity arises. Follow the bunched extensors up the ulna,asymptotically approaching the knob of the epicondyle, a well-known roadto fingers scarred with grief and swollen with disappointment: fingersthat have brushed lips and drawn a thousand timesthe Chinese character for “squander,”fingers that hold a razor in the blue lightof mornings so far away that calendars inspire silent rage. But hush. They walksteadily, for all that, like a drunk who can walk a straight line for the sheriff.I'll be able to do massage up to the momentI pitch face-forward in the grave.

But what, you asked, about the deeper massage of the spirit? Those hungry ghosts that have been hounding you for more than twenty years? I have to stop at that,And look at my enciphered hands.What, indeed. My pockets come up empty.If I had an old butterscotchwrapped in cellophane, I'd offer it to you,and you'd sit up with the blankets around your shouldersand we'd suddenly be best friends,the last awake at the slumber party,and tell each other secrets. We didn't want that much:a kiss from that boy with the soulful eyes,a word of encouragement from Mrs Tyler,a ride on Evelyn's bike when it was new.

And I would sit on the floor, and catch your dangling foot, and kissin passing the outside malleolus,and hold your toes against my chest.It's time, time that's the enemy,time and wanting more. Just let this momentlinger. Faust was trying to cheat: he knewthat if ever we could want just this, just now,we would vanish:leaving God and Devil, empty handed,gaping at the air.